Thursday, 5 May 2016

Drag

Imagine
using the politics of fear to try to get elected in a city as buzzing and
optimistic as London.

Imagine if the only way you felt you could appeal to
Londoners was by making them feel petrified and promising that you, a decent,
caring, saviour-style politician, would keep them safe from the myriad harms
that surround them.

Oh,
and I’m not talking about Zac Goldsmith, by the way. I’m talking about theWomen’s
Equality Party(WEP),
whose peddling of fear makes Zac look like a rank amateur in the doom-spreading
stakes.

In recent days the liberal press has featured
finger-wagging editorials about Zac’s fearmongering about Islamist terrorism
and gushing accounts of the WEP, which was founded last year by Radio 4 comic
Sandi Toksvig and other movers and shakers in the elite media set.

Which is
weird, because all the criticisms being made of Zac and his fear card could
just as easily be made of the WEP.

Where
Zac has used the spectre of terrorism to try to get into City Hall, not least
in that notoriousDaily Mailarticle with the photo of the blown-up
London bus, the WEP uses the spectre of rape.

No one else cares about rape,
of course; just the WEP. If you don’t want to get raped, vote WEP — that’s the
grotesque, fear-exploiting message.

Where Zac has hinted that
there are loads of Islamists in our midst waiting to harm us, and that
Sadiq is mates with some of them, the WEP goes one better: it suggests every
aspect of everyday life is harmful, primarily for women.

Because of ‘catcalls in the
street’ and ‘everyday sexism’, ‘millions of women feel unsafe every day of
their lives’,it
says.

This is worse than anything Zac has hinted at.

Sure, he might suggest that some Muslims pose a threat to London life, but the
WEP hints that everyone — well, men — make London scary and unpleasant.

Want to
stop feeling freaked out whenever you leave the house? Vote WEP.

And don’t think you can avoid the
terrors of daily life by staying home and browsing the internet or flicking through a magazine.

Nope, that isn’t safe either.

Magazines
are full of ‘adverts telling us to starve ourselves’,says the WEP.

And then
there’s the ‘trolling, abuse and violence perpetrated on social media that
never seems to get taken down’.

Leaving aside the question of how violence can
be perpetrated in a virtual space between people who are miles apart, the
message here is pretty clear: the internet is terrifying and some of it needs
to be ‘taken down’.

Want to feel safe online? Want censorship to deal with
trolls? Want to be saved from harmful words by politicians who know what’s good
for you? Vote WEP.

What a soul-crushing message to
go into an election with.

Violence is everywhere, streets are unsafe, people
are sexist, the internet is dangerous, and magazines will turn you into a sad
puddle of self-doubt.

The WEP’s campaign confirms that
the new feminism is just another strand of the politics of fear.

For all its
pretensions to radicalism, for all its hinting that it’s the heir to the
women’s lib movement, the WEP is really just a slightly sassier, slightly
younger version (though only slightly) of Mary Whitehouse.

Men are
rapacious, the media will warp your mind, ‘taking it down’ is the best approach
to dodgy commentary — you couldn’t fit a sheet of Rizla between the outlook of
the WEP and the censorious fear once promoted by the blue-rinse lobby.

The
WEP may have made waves in theGuardianand among the Twitterati, which isn’t
surprising considering it is chattering-class to the core.

But it seems to have
made almost no impact on the public consciousness, including on women’s
consciousness.

That isn’t surprising either: the new feminism, with its narrow
obsession with getting more female voices on the Today programme or ensuring
Twitter is safe for plummy feminists to chat to each other without a gruff bloke
saying ‘Bollocks’ at them, has nothing whatsoever to say to most women.

The WEP might view the streets
and the internet and the media as dangerous, but most normal women don’t.

Most
women like life, and public space, and unpredictable interactions, and they
believe they can handle themselves without needing Mary Whitehouses in women’s
libber drag to chaperone them from morning to night.